Last week we revisited one of the old Madison Square Gardens—the second one, which stood from 1890 to 1925—and one commenter recalled that Gilded Age architect Stanford White (who designed the building) was killed on the rooftop garden. The story of his murder, which took place on June 25th, 1906, has been well-documented, and begins with the fact that White had not intended to be at the Garden that night, but when a trip to Philadelphia had been postponed he decided to join other rooftop revelers to watch the premiere of a musical review.
The MSG rooftop garden in 1900. (Courtesy of the MCNY)
"A younger man moved through the crowd... This handsome, glowering figure drew a slight amount of attention by wearing a black overcoat in the heat of summer. Earlier in the evening the hatcheck girl had made numerous attempts to check the coat, but the man had steadfastly refused.
Still, the crowd paid little attention to the eccentrically dressed man. As a performer broke into a song called 'I Could Love A Million Girls,' the man strode over to [the] table of [White].
From beneath the overcoat, the young man produced a pistol and fired three close range shots directly into the face of the older man. The victims elbow, suddenly inert, slid off the table, which overturned with a thump and a clatter. The body slumped to the floor.
At first, there was awkward silence. Then, there came a bit of terse laughter as many assumed the spectacle to be part of the show. Elaborate practical jokes were commonplace among New York society. As the mangled and bloody face, blackened with powder burns, became visible, the screams began."
The man was millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and some retellings of the story say that when his wife Evelyn Nesbit saw it was him with the pistol in his hand, she asked what he had done. He replied, "All right dearie, I have probably saved your life." What did he mean by that? Turns out years prior to the murder—when she was around 16-years-old and modeling—White had brought Nesbit up to the "adulterous loft [which had a red velvet swing] in a four-story brick row house at 22 West 24th Street" that he designed, and fed her some champagne. Soon after "she began to feel groggy and lost consciousness. Hours later, Evelyn awoke to find pain between her legs. She saw the evidence of Whites violation on her thighs." Nesbit, who was somewhat of an icon and called "America's first bona-fide sex-goddess," told different versions of that story throughout her life.
Thaw knew about the incident and had a long-standing vendetta against White, saying he "ruined" his wife. In 1926 he wrote a book about the White murder, titled The Traitor—he said he never regretted murdering White, and that he would do it again. The "love triangle" and murder were highly publicized, and even retold on the stage numerous times (including in Ragtime).
The original NY Times article on the murder can be read here, and there is a large archive documenting White's life, as well as Thaw's trials.
Thaw was held in the Tombs following the murder (where he refused to eat without a proper fork and knife!). In 1908 he was "sentenced to incarceration for life at the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Fishkill, New York," where he escaped from in 1913 and fled to Canada. He eventually secured a new trial, and in 1915 that jury found him "not guilty, no longer insane, and set him free." (That year his wife also divorced him.)
The following year Thaw was charged with the kidnapping, beating, and sexual assault of nineteen-year old Frederick Gump of Kansas City. He was confined to Kirkbride Asylum until 1924, and went on to live out the rest of his life a free man, until his death in 1947 from a heart attack.
When the building where the scandal originated, White's tryst tower on West 24th Street, collapsed in 2007, one man told the NY Times, "I don’t care much about pedophiles. It was just another old New York building. There were rats on the bottom and pigeons on the top.”
